A look back at yesterday’s lux vehicles

Today’s luxury vehicles have sleek lines and are packed with technology. What distinguished the prestige vehicles of 50 years ago were enormous size and smooth rides, said Brian Rygiel, the general manager for Brown’s Classic Autos in Scottsdale.

Luxury ride

“The cars of that era—Lincolns and Cadillacs, for example—remind me of boats,” Rygiel said, “with a long stopping distance and a big turning radius. The difference between a luxury vehicle and a non-luxury car in those days was that riding in a luxury car in 1967 felt like riding on a couch instead of in a truck. And the luxury cars in those days featured lots of chrome.”

But unlike today’s luxury vehicles, those of five decades ago had huge engines, Rygiel said, and “sucked a lot of gas. And the braking systems were horrible.”

Performance on luxury vehicles rebounded slowly, said Drew Alcazar, CEO and co-founder of Russo and Steele Collector Automobile Auctions in Scottsdale. There wasn’t a significant enhancement of performance until the mid-90s, Alcazar said, but gradual improvement in vehicle performance led to a “golden age” for Mercedes-Benz between in 1986 and 1999, with “extremely well-built vehicles and fairly limited production.”

Another stroll down memory lane

Before that, in the late 1970s, Porsche launched the highly collectible 930 Turbo, Alcazar said.

“It represented a pivotal shift in performance in the luxury car market,” he said, with a cool look that still boasted plenty of horsepower and high emissions and crash standards. The luxury brands of the mid-and late ‘70s included Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln and Rolls-Royce, he said.

“In the mid-1980s, the leading luxury brands were Jaguar and Mercedes, Rygiel said. Mercedes has always been known for its superior engineering,” he said. “And Jaguars were intended for the elite of the elite.”

The Jaguar brand was hurt substantially by the introduction of the Lexus brand shortly thereafter, he said. “The reliability and smoothness of the Lexus ride almost killed Jaguar.” Features and accessories that defined luxury in the ‘80s and early ‘90s included gold-plated emblems, power seats, power windows and a cell phone in the console, Rygiel said.

In the mid-1990s, technology features were becoming more and more typical in luxury vehicles, Alcazar said, but they were very expensive to include. Today, power features, cruise control and automatically dimming headlights are standard in most cars, but 20 years ago they were limited to luxury vehicles, Alcazar said.